The After Birthday: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The good: On Saturday morning we met up with many friendlies at Tucanos so all of us May birthday people (there were 3 of us) could use our birthday coupons. We stuffed our faces and it was delightful indeed to see so many of our peeps AND get to eat those cheese rolls at the same time. Drew's sister, Elise, has been in town and it was especially nice to get to have some birthday festivities with her as well. She also came bearing a gift of an H&M gift card, which I will put to good use as soon as it opens in the fall (SCORE). The Ls gave me a wacky eyeglasses-style straw (http://www.latestbuy.com.au/drinking-straw-glasses.html). I haven't *quite* put those to good use (yet!) but I'm sure the event will be thoroughly documented, to everyone's amusement.
After Tucano's some of us girls (+Drew) took a little trip up to the mall. I just love the mall. I think I could spend hours there walking around and not actually buying anything. This time I found, at last, a maxi dress.

The bad: I actually can't think of anything for this section, but you can't just say "the good and the ugly." Let's transition to that right now.

~*~*~*magical transition*~*~*~

The ugly: I set a goal last summer to make a red velvet cake. I've never done it, and I like red velvet so I wanted to try it. But then we went to England and I never did it when we got back. So I set that goal again for this year and my birthday seemed like a good occasion (for the record, Drew did offer to make my cake). So! I made the batter. It looked beautiful. I put them in the oven. They smelled delicious. I opened the door...and they both had fallen. I sighed, but was not defeated. After all, frosting can cover many flaws, yes? Well, it can if your recipe makes enough frosting which mine, inexplicably, did not. Okay, so maybe I could have sent Drew off to the store for more frosting supplies. But the cake already looked like a sinkhole anyway and it looked so AWFUL that at that point abandoning it and making another attempt later seemed like the better solution. So, abandon it I did. And MAYBE (maybe) Drew felt a little wrath-of-the-foiled-baker (I love you, peaches!), but in the end we came out of the event unscathed.

Since I couldn't bear to let anyone see my disfigured and half-frosted cake we met up with our friendlies again sans cake. In the end the cake situation turned out well, with an expedition to Walmart, the buying of a chocolate mousse cake and the singing of the birthday song. Thanks, friendlies! One day I hope to give you some red velvet cake.
As an epilogue to the unfortunate cake story, after lunch the next day Drew said, "Now, can I FINALLY eat some of this cake??" It tasted good, for all of its wretchedness. I guess that's something.

As an epilogue to that epilogue, Elise suggested I made the sad cake into a trifle and so I did! Elise, thanks for the idea--if you come back you can have some trifle. It tastes pretty good and it's a heck of a lot prettier to boot.